Regarding the coming year, national team captain Marco Rossi said: It is time for the Hungarian national football team to achieve its goals.
On Saturday, the Italian coach stated on the M4 Sport channel that, as of September 2020, they have achieved amazing and wonderful results that will remain forever in the history book of Hungarian football.
Fans will always remember her, he said, but now we have to focus on the future.
Rossi remembers that they played Albania twice last year and lost both times, which is the main reason they could only watch the World Cup in Qatar on TV. He added that they were there at the European Championships, and the memory of that is really great, even if the cup seems half empty, because they were six minutes away from qualifying in the group stage. It was a similar situation in this year’s Nations League, where they could have fought for a place in the quarter-finals with a last-round draw, which they eventually missed out on.
“As we say in Italy: We went to Rome, but did not see the Pope. This means that we were close to the goal, but for some reason we did not reach it. Now is the time to reach those goals. The first of these and the most important at the moment is the struggle for direct access to the next European Championship.
On March 27, the Hungarians will host Bulgaria in the first round of the qualifiers for the 2024 Continental Championship in Germany, and then they will meet Montenegro, Serbia and Lithuania.
The top two from each of the ten qualifying groups advance to the 24-team tournament. 12 national teams can fight for the three remaining places in the additional qualifiers scheduled for March 2024, which – thanks to the eighth place won in the League of Nations – the Hungarian national team can almost certainly appear, if it does not succeed in the traditional. Qualifications.
Division A, B and C teams “in need of supplementary examination” each have four places. This means that in the event of a unsuccessful qualifying series, the Hungarians will only be able to improve on additional qualifiers if at least four of the seven teams that finished ahead of them in the Nations League are below the top two in their group. eligible group.
“We know it won’t be easy, because we have to play away in difficult places many times, for example against Bulgaria or Montenegro. It will be a tough job, but we have to be ready and we want to be ready”, explained the captain.
Rossi stated that at the start of the European Championship qualifiers and the qualifiers for the next World Cup, they should remember what they saw while watching the World Cup, who and why qualified instead of them, what they were better at and what they can learn from. He. She.
“We have to learn from our mistakes, because if we don’t, we will only get older, but we won’t be wiser,” said the Italian coach.